Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Staunton, September 12 – All governments
try to put their best foot forward especially in advance of elections, but the
Russian state agencies are going above and beyond what regimes normally do,
putting out figures that for various reasons can’t be true or that in fact on
close inspection highlight just how bad the situation in Russia now is.

Eduard Gavrilov, the head of the
Health Independent Monitoring Foundation, tells Sonya Noreman of the Babr news
portal of Irkutsk that the health ministry is using double standards and
manipulating death data in order to come up with “improved” numbers for Moscow
to issue (babr24.com/msk/?IDE=164931).

Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova,
he notes, has trumped a small decline in death rates this year, but she ignores
the fact that the new rate, 514.4 cases per 100,000 members of the working age
population, is still “330 cases greater than in EU countries,” with whom Russia
often compares itself.

“The leadership of the health
ministry, Gavriolv continues, “over the course of several years has regularly
changed its approach to the interpretation of data on mortality. When death
rates fall, the ministry gives itself all the credit, but when they go up, the
health care system suddenly has nothing to do with that. Instead, aging,
smoking and other factors are blamed.

More serious, however, is the way in
which the ministry forces doctors to change the cause of death so that Moscow’s
figures look better. According to the Doctors of the Russian Federation
Community, 34 percent of Russian doctors say they are familiar with “manipulations
of the diagnoses of the cause of death in hospitals.”

According to that organization, the
blame lies entirely on Moscow: The health ministry gives orders for the numbers
it wants to the regions, the regions then pass these on to the heads of
hospitals, and then the chief doctors there direct the regular doctors to
report what the center needs.

But that is far from the only way in
which Moscow is falsifying the situation.According to the Forum-MSK portal, the life expectancy boosts the health
ministry has been reported are possible only if no one has died in the last
seven months and some have seen the calendar speed up (forum-msk.org/material/news/13692907.html).

If in fact, as the ministry claims,
live expectancy has increased by 0.583 years over the last seven months, that
means, the portal says, that “during these seven months, no one died so that
life expectancy could grow by that amount.”Men are the real “shock workers” in this regard, the portal says: their
life expectancy has increased more than the amount of time passed.

But even if those figures are
somehow accurate – and the portal argues they can’t be – they would only raise
Russia in the world rankings from below that of China, Boliva and Kyrgyzstan to
that of Libya, Azerbaijan and Paraguay.However, that figure isn’t even the worst aspect of the minister’s
statement.

The health minister proudly claims
that Russia has made big progress against tuberculosis and other diseases,
forgetting to mention that even the new improved numbers Moscow is offering put
it far behind European countries – and indeed in some cases further behind than
it was a generation ago.

As a result, the portal concludes, “the
government of Russia in its current form is incapable of offering any serious
program to increase the live expectancy of Russians even to the level of
developed countries. Over the 17 years of Putin’s rule, it remains more than
ten years behind them” on that measure.

And the reason is this: “spending on
healthcare has been sharply reduced, dropping from five to two percent of GDP.”
Russia may be able to compete with the West militarily, but it can’t compete at
all in terms of healthcare and life expectancy.

This list of distorted data could be
expanded almost infinitely. But two cases that surfaced this week are at least
worthy of note: According to the first, HIV/AIDS activists say that Moscow is
simply lying when it claims that 44 percent of all AIDS victims in that country
are getting help. That figure is an embarrassment; the real one, much lower is
criminal (takiedela.ru/news/2017/09/12/nemnozhko-goloslovno/).

As a result of the failure of the government
to get the necessary medicines into the hands of those suffering from this
disease, activists say, 80 Russians are dying of AIDS every day, a figure that
means Russia is suffering nearly 30,000 premature deaths from that disease
alone (republic.ru/posts/86330).

And according to the second, offered by
scholars at the Higher School of Economics, Russians should be pleased that at
any given income they can now afford to buy the ingredients for cabbage soup, a
statement that is likely true at least in most part of the country but that
ignores that they can afford to buy much less meat and healthier foods (republic.ru/posts/86330).